Reviews

Ok, this is really horrible movie. Bad acting, bad directing and sometimes even bad camera and cuts. I watched it only for the cars and I had to laugh couple of times again. Those moments when view cuts to speedo, which shows.... how much??? 100...120 MPH? What the hell is that. I am cruising at that speed every morning when going to work or school! You American guys should go to Europe to see the real 2 Fast 2 Furious traffic. Everyday. Yes, we may have those small funny cars with turbodiesel engines and manual shifting, but boy, they DO MOVE. VW Golf TDI with 6-gear transmission has no problem reaching 130 MPH and my 13-year old stock MR2 NA (Swiss model, not that crappy US 3S-FE model engine) can do 235 KPH / 145 MPH easily on German highways. Yes, we have expesive fuel (2-3 times the US price), yes we have small cars - but Europeans do know how to drive them. Try Germany or Italy and you will laugh next time you see 2 Fast 2 Furious.

The Alternate, a story of President's mock-kidnapp that turns into a real hostage situation was aired just recently on nationwide TV here in Czech Rep. I saw it rather accidentally all through to the very end as I really wanted to know if every other minute will be as stupid as all the previous.

The Alternate really does it all, but unfortunately the other way out. All the plot twists (all places tha are supposed to be twists) are really the weakest links - the characters do almost always the opposite of what would any sane person do. The president just sits there (afraid of heights), our main hero makes silly phone calls with FBI in which he only says that he is fine and that he is the guy in the suit, and the bad guy (as well as the good guy) just always miss and in situations that should be filled with action, they just start with lines of stupid chat.

Really nothing in this movie was quite right. The FX were sometimes really silly, the martial fights were oscillating between acceptable quality and total crap and out of the thousands of rounds fired in the movie there is hardly dozen on target.

The act is horrible, but that is mainly due to stupid script and bad direction. You should see this only if you fancy B movies that are so stupid, that you can laugh at them.

This is a typical and perfect example of Italian "crazy" comedy with Villagio and Pozzeto. Maybe better than crazy would be "Toilet" comedy, as the humor is sometimes quite disgusting and thick - in other words great.

In US only recently some similar films started to appear - Scary Movie 1 and 2 are good examples. Only that Le Comiche movies (It was distributed in Czech Rep. under "Blazniva komedie" - Crazy comedy name) are much better at this, since the Italians (and Villagio in the first place) have years of experience with this genre. But this is no parody, or at least no parody-in-the-first-place. All Comiche movies are rather short stories loosely tied together to arrange situations for the slightly humiliating Villagio-Pozzeto humor.

One example I remember from Le Comiche 2 - Pozzeto and Villagio are making money by selling the vacuum cleaner (hoover) machines. They come to a hotel in Alps to demonstrate the machine - first they start with throwing dust and paper on the carpet and then Villagio gets couple of bags and says: "and now for some s***, this is cow's, the other one is dog's and this one, it is my own, genuine, made it this morning..." Naturally, they end up with piles of shit mixed with cleaing foam and they try to run away as the machine doesn't work (which is just start of the "hotel" story).

So if you really like comedies and are not afraid of toilet humor (and do not mind making fun of pregnant, disabled or ill persons) you should really see Le Comiche. Any of the three is good, but first and the second one are best. By the way - if you'll like Villagio, you should try some of the Fantozzi movies too - though I am not sure if Americans will understand all of the humor there (no pun intended).